Herald-Sun, The (includes Raleigh Extra and ChapelHill Herald (Durham, NC)

Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC)

October 28, 2006

Complaint labels West Village art 'explicit'

Author: GREGORY PHILLIPS gphillips@heraldsun.com; 419-6636Edition: FinalSection: MetroPage: B1Index Terms:artEstimated printed pages: 3Article Text:U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart refused to define pornography in 1964, all thewhile insisting "but I know it when I see it."A mystery man last week thought he saw just that -- porn -- masquerading as art in adowntown Durham apartment building, and complained about it to Durham police. Thesingle complaint led to an "ivy leaf" solution -- the covering of part of the exhibit with brown paper.Culture Crawl has seen rotating monthlong displays of art on the walls of the lobby atWest Village -- 241 loft apartments and commercial space on West Morgan Street -- for the past 18 months or so without a murmur. But just a day after 37-year-old artist CynthiaGrow put up nine 4-by-3 nude paintings of herself in a hallway for the latest CultureCrawl exhibition, an unidentified but angry man started a row.Cecily Ferguson, West Village assistant manager and Culture Crawl curator, said thelaunch of Grow's exhibition Oct. 20 featured a large and mixed crowd, including parentsand young children, and no one complained.The next morning, however, a man who Ferguson guesses was in his 60s came into her office irate, "saying we had pornography on the walls," she said.She told him it was artwork and "he stormed out." About 45 minutes later, the policeshowed up saying a similar-sounding man had registered a complaint about two of the paintings. Both show the nude female subject partially covering her genital area with onehand.Ferguson said she feels the police were simply trying to appease the man. But theyordered the two paintings taken down, handing her a copy of the statute governing thedisplay of material harmful to minors -- which includes "sexually explicit nudity" -- andtelling her she could be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor if she didn't comply.Grow, who studied art in Italy and has displayed her work in New York and Philadelphia,initially took down all nine paintings. But then she decided to display them covered in brown paper from the shoulders down. Each is now adorned with an essay from the National Coalition Against Censorship that states nude paintings don't constitute obscenematerial, which it says lacks serious social, political or artistic value."It was kind of a play on [the police] saying we could display them if the obscene parts